Gustavus Adolphus College’s annual Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Lecture will feature Mark Hanis, who will present a lecture titled “Never Again is Again in Darfur: Taking a Stand Against Genocide.” Hanis’s talk is scheduled for 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 13 in Wallenberg Auditorium, located in the Alfred Nobel Hall of Science. The event is free and open to the public.
Hanis founded the Genocide Intervention Network (GI-NET) while a student at Swarthmore College, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science. GI-NET seeks to empower individuals and communities with the tools necessary to prevent and stop genocide. Its members envision a world in which the global community is willing and able to protect civilians from genocide and mass atrocities.
A major area of concern for GI-NET is Darfur, a region of Sudan that is about the size of Texas. Darfur is home to racially mixed tribes of settled peasants, who identify as African, and nomadic herders, who identify as Arab. In the ongoing genocide, African farmers and others in Darfur are being systematically displaced and murdered at the hands of a government-supported militia recruited from local Arab tribes. The genocide in Darfur has claimed 400,000 lives and displaced more than 2.5 million people since February 2003.
The Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Lecture was established at Gustavus in 1983 and honors the heroism and legacy of Raoul Wallenberg whose support of persecuted Jews during World War II saved the lives of many.
The lecture is sponsored by the Peace Studies Program at Gustavus and is part of the “Taking a Stand Against Genocide” program, a collaboration between Gustavus, GI-NET, St. Peter High School, the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, and the American Refugee Committee.
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